Nixon at 100

Remembering the "Old Man" who set the GOP on the path to becoming the New Majority Party.

The following is from a speech given by Patrick J. Buchanan during the Richard M. Nixon Centennial celebration in Washington, D.C., on January 9, 2013.

We are here tonight to celebrate the centennial of a statesman, a profile in courage and an extraordinary man we are all proud to have served: the 37th president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Years ago, Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post wrote that she belonged to what she called “the Nixon generation.”

“What distinguishes us as a group,” she said, is that “we are too young to remember a time when Richard Nixon was not on the political scene, and too old reasonably to expect that we shall see one.” Greenfield was distressed about this.

Yet her thesis rings true. We are the Nixon Generation. We were born into and lived through what Bole Dole called “the Age of Nixon.”

And what a time it was — and what a man he was.

Home from the war in 1946, Richard Nixon was elected to the 80th Congress and swiftly became its most famous member. For he would exhibit early on an attribute that would mark his whole life: perseverance.

Because he believed a disheveled ex-communist named Whittaker Chambers, and because he distrusted an establishment icon, Alger Hiss, Rep. Nixon persevered to expose the wartime treason of Hiss.

By 1948, he was an American hero, so popular the Democratic Party did not field a candidate against him. In 1950, he captured a Senate seat with the largest majority in the history of California.

Yet the same people who just loved Harry Truman’s “Give ‘Em Hell” campaign of 1948 whined that Nixon played too rough.

In the Taft-Eisenhower battle of 1952, an internationalist, the Boss stood with Ike and, at 39, was the vice presidential nominee — and a man of destiny.

Then it was that the establishment first moved to bring him down. They hyped a phony story about a political fund, alleged it was for Sen. Nixon’s personal benefit, and instigated a hue and cry for Gen. Eisenhower to drop him from the ticket.

Nixon’s decision to defend his record and integrity in the “Checkers” speech, though mocked by his enemies, remains the most brilliant use of television by a political figure in the 20th century.

In the 1950s, he redefined the vice presidency as a force in foreign policy, braved a lynch mob in Caracas, became the first vice president to travel behind the Iron Curtain and confronted Nikita Khrushchev’s bluster in the “Kitchen Debate.”

By 1960, he had no serious challenger for the nomination.

After the closest election in a century, about which there hung the aroma of vote fraud in Texas and Illinois, he went home to California to run for governor. After a brutal primary, he was gaining on Gov. Brown when the Cuban missile crisis broke his momentum, and the Boss went down to his second defeat — and looked to be out for the count.

Believing he had nothing to lose, he came down from his suite the morning after that defeat to deliver to the press words that will live in infamy. As Cactus Jack Garner said, “He gave it to ‘em with the bark on.”

He was now thought to be finished. ABC put together an instant documentary titled, “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.” The featured interview in the obituary was political analyst Alger Hiss.

But, as Mark Twain said, reports of his death were premature.

Moving his family to New York to practice law, Richard Nixon entered what he would call his wilderness years.

But after the Goldwater-Rockefeller bloodbath in 1964, with the party bitterly divided, the Boss volunteered to introduce the nominee at the Cow Palace and did so in one of the finest addresses he ever delivered.

But after he brought that contentious convention together with his introduction, Sen. Goldwater proceeded to tear it apart again, declaring, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

Dwight Chapin was in the limo that carried the Boss away from the Cow Palace. He has told me what the Boss said about Sen. Goldwater’s speech. But there is no need to repeat those discouraging words here.

Almost all the other name Republicans abandoned Goldwater. The Old Man stood by him. He traveled the nation, working longer and harder for Goldwater and the party than the senator himself.

After the crushing defeat that fall, the Republican Party was reduced to one-half of the Democratic Party’s strength: 140 House seats, 32 senate seats, 17 governors. The Republican Party was a house divided and a house in ruins. It was an open question whether it would survive

And now began the greatest comeback in American political history.

When I arrived in New York to join the Boss in January 1966, his staff consisted of three people: I occupied one desk in the office outside his own. A second occupant was Rose Woods, and the third, a “Miss Ryan” — more exactly Patricia Ryan Nixon, the future first lady of the United States, from whom I used to bum cigarettes.

The altarpiece of that year was Richard Nixon’s six-weeks war against what LBJ called “My Congress.” Alone of the national Republicans, the Boss campaigned across the country — in 35 states and 80 congressional districts. In November, his bold prediction of a 40-seat Republican gain in the House proved conservative. We won 47.

After a year off, traveling the world, came the campaign of 1968, the most divisive year in American history since the Civil War.

Consider all that happened that year.

As we flew to New Hampshire the last day of January, the siege of Khe Sanh was at its height, and the Tet Offensive had just begun. Four weeks later, Gov. Romney quit the race. Sen. Eugene McCarthy then stunned the nation by capturing 42 percent of the vote against Lyndon Johnson. And Robert Kennedy declared for president.

On March 31, the Boss asked me to monitor the president’s speech on Vietnam on a car radio at LaGuardia — to brief him when he arrived back from visiting Julie at Smith. At the end of the speech, President Johnson announced he would not run again.

Four days after this political earthquake, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Washington and 100 other cities exploded in riots that lasted days and required tens of thousands of troops.

In early June, a week after our Oregon primary victory, I got a 3 a.m. call from our Bible Building headquarters. Robert Kennedy had been shot in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. I called the Boss. Julie and David had been watching TV and already awakened him.

That August, the Democratic Party came apart in a bloody brawl between police and protesters in the streets of Chicago. And so it went in that dramatic and divisive year. But at its end, Richard Nixon was president of the United States.

Now, consider the city he came to, and the hostility he found.

The nation had been torn apart by a half decade of assassinations and riots, crime and campus anarchy. Thirty thousand American were dead in Vietnam, and half a million U.S. soldiers were tied down in an endless war. America was coming apart.

Richard Nixon was the first president since Zachary Taylor to take the oath with both houses of Congress against him. The bureaucracy was deep-dyed Democratic. The press corps was 90 percent hostile. The Warren Court was at the peak of its power. And the Best and Brightest who had led us into Vietnam were deserting to join their children in protests against what they suddenly discovered was “Nixon’s War.”

As the presidential limousine came up Pennsylvania Avenue after the inaugural, it was showered with debris. As Shelley and I were entering the White House reviewing stand for the inaugural parade, the Secret Service asked us to step off the planks onto the muddy lawn, as the president was right behind us. As he passed by me, he looked over, and in the first words I ever heard from Richard Nixon as president of the United States, words I shall always remember, the president said,

“Buchanan, was that you throwing the eggs?”

Yet consider what he accomplished.

By the end of his first term, all U.S. troops were out of Vietnam, our POWs were on the way home, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands. He had ended the war with honor, as he promised.

He had negotiated and signed the greatest arms limitation treaty since the Washington Naval Agreement of 1922: SALT I and the ABM Treaty.

He had ended the implacable hostility between the United States and People’s Republic of China that had endured since Mao’s Revolution and the Korean War.

In his second term, he would order the strategic airlift that saved Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Israel never had a better friend, said Golda Meir.

In November 1972, Richard Nixon was rewarded with the most sweeping landslide in history — 49 states and 60 percent of the vote.

Because of the campaigns he had conducted in ’66, ’68, ’70 and ’72, a party on its deathbed in 1964 was on its way to becoming The New Majority Party, America’s Party, which would capture the presidency and carry 40 or more states in four of the next five presidential elections.

The president’s memoirs begin, “I was born in a house my father built.” Well, the Republican Party in the last third of the 20th century was the house that Nixon built.

In domestic policy, he was the first environmental president, creating the Council on Environmental Quality and EPA.

To battle the scourge of cancer, the created the National Cancer Institute.

To close the widening chasm between the generations and professionalize our military, he ended the draft.

He made six nominations to the Supreme Court. Four made it. Not a bad average, when you consider the Senate he had to deal with.

As for our Southern strategy, when Richard Nixon first took the oath of office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When he left, it was 70 percent.

As Bob Dole said in his eulogy at Yorba Linda, it was the Age of Nixon. While Nixon was a dominant figure on the national stage in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, his influence lived on through the 20th century and into the 21st

Would there be a Gerald R. Ford presidential library, had it not been for Richard Nixon selecting this honorable and good man as vice president?

Would there be a George H.W. Bush presidential library, if Richard Nixon had not recognized the talent of this man who had just lost his second statewide race in Texas in 1970 and made him chairman of the Republican National Committee, then ambassador to the United Nations?

When Ronald Reagan came out of the West to launch his revolution, his first national security adviser and first domestic policy chief, Dick Allen and Marty Anderson, both came out of our ’68 campaign and White House staff.

Both of Reagan’s secretaries of state and his secretary of defense — Al Haig, George Shultz and Cap Weinberger — came out of the Nixon National Security Council or Nixon Cabinet.

The man Reagan chose as chief justice, William Rehnquist, had been put on the court by Richard Nixon.

Reagan’s choice as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, was the domestic policy research coordinator in Nixon’s ’68 campaign.

In 1996, when Bob Dole was the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, he was being most closely pursued by two former members of Richard Nixon’s White House staff.

Lamar Alexander was one. And I forget the other guy.

That brings back a memory of the 1992 election, after I had lost 10 straight primaries to President Bush. I called the Old Man in Saddle River. When he came on the line, I said: “Ten for ten. Not bad, eh, sir?” President Nixon paused and said: “Buchanan, you’re the only extremist I know with a sense of humor. Come on up, and bring Shelley with you.”

In 2001, George W. Bush chose as secretary of defense the man that Richard Nixon had picked to head up LBJ’s poverty agency, OEO, and to monitor wage and price controls, two plum assignments for a rising young Republican star, Donald Rumsfeld, before President Nixon named him the ambassador to NATO.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that “it is required of a man that he share the action and passion of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”

Richard Nixon shared the action and passion of his time. Again and again, he came back from woundings, he came back from defeats. After he left the White House, he would write nine books on foreign policy and the great men he had known. There were many. For only Franklin Roosevelt equaled Richard Nixon in having been on five presidential tickets.

As this centennial approached, the phone calls started coming in from the offspring of the old jackal pack, asking my thoughts on Watergate. My great regret is the Old Man is not here tonight so I can tell him my thoughts on his old tormenters. In the words of Nick Carraway to Gatsby:

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25 Responses to Nixon at 100

Excellent speech. Below is a quote from Jonathan Aiken in the Daily Telegraph about Nixon:
” I accompanied him to a rowdy Oxford Union in 1978 when, in answer to a hostile student questioner on Watergate, he retorted, “You’re right. I screwed up. And I paid the price. Mea culpa. But let’s get on. You’ll be here in the year 2000 and we’ll see how I’m regarded then.”

I admit that during the 1970s, I was a Nixon hater. But even when he resigned, I commented that Shakespeare could write a tragedy about him. His character flaws deprived him of what he wanted most. He and the great political characters of his time. The present politicians are squalid pygmies compared to him and his. I realize he wanted what he thought was best for the country. It was not a matter of personal aggrandizement. With the experience of the last 35 years, I view him far, far more favorably. I am so pleased that you and Taki and McConnell created the TAC.

“As for our Southern strategy, when Richard Nixon first took the oath of office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When he left, it was 70 percent.”

This is the worst piece of revisionism in this piece. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was in 1971. It knocked down the final barriers to segregation. The South voted Republican because they saw what was happening and wanted to stop it. When they didn’t win, it made them even more Republican. The implication that Nixon was leading desegregation is ridiculous.

I remember being a high school student during Clinton’s second term. Our government teacher–a shrill, short-haired liberal’s liberal–listed half-dozen or so recent former presidents, Nixon being one, and asked us to guess which was considered to be the worst president (by the metric of some group). Being high-school morons, probably none of us could name a single accomplishment of the men listed. Regardless, all of us listed Nixon as the worst. She was flabbergasted by our responses, as he was at or near the top–which was when she taught us a valuable lesson about dissociating the media’s projection of a president and his actual accomplishments. While she hated the man and reveled in his downfall, she couldn’t say he was a bad president.

Nixon was without question a near brilliant thinker, quick study and knew where the bodies were buried.

His profound character flaws have been well illuminated by now. Yet when compared to his contemporaries (LBJ for example) he is surely no worse. Simply less skilled in deviousness. A Republican in a Democrat town.

This said, he was a failure from the standpoint of paleoconservatism, as have been all the rest of the GOP Presidents.

In extolling Nixon’s virtues as President, Pat has de facto endorsed statism, big government and the continuing reign of the MIC/CIA duopoly. A defense made for liberals.

In other words: RepubliCratism. A virus for which vaccination only recently appeared in the form of Ron Paul.

How better off the nation today would be if the eastern liberal/banking/international “interests” had not successfully sabotaged the nomination in 1952 of Robert Taft.

Great piece about a great man. Flawed, as we all are, but still great.

I guess I’m a 70s conservative. I am appalled by what has come to pass for conservative thought. I see the current ‘practioners’ and their cheerleaders thoroughly dismantling and discarding the machinery of the party that Nixon built, and which Reagan and Bush 1 continued, especially as regards foreign policy, but also as regards practicality vs ideology.

Might the “fresh” conservatives of today study their own history? Then again, TAC was founded to keep that possibility alive.

The myth of JFK persists to this day while Richard Nixon has been relegated to purgatory by the New York and California media powers. From something I posted on Foreign Policy:

If this famine did not present enough of a challenge to the Chinese, a book by Richard Reeves claimed that John Fitzgerald Kennedy using the services of Averell Harriman was planning to offer Nikita Khrushchev the opportunity to share intelligence and possibly join forces to attack China, chiefly focusing on its nuclear capability.[1] This magnanimous gesture was contemplated in 1961. The Kennedy of Camelot legend told Andre Malraux, the French minister of culture, the Chinese were prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of their citizens to achieve their goals. Mr. Kennedy assessed this possibility – “This is the great menace in the future to humanity, the free world and freedom on earth”.

For those who remember the year 1969 the Russians and Chinese skirmished along the Ussuri River in a quarrel with origins which long predated the onset of communism. Only this time the Russians were prepared to bomb China by themselves. Shortly thereafter Leonid Brezhnev at a summit meeting asked Mr. Nixon how he felt about having a consortium against China. Mr. Nixon did not acquiesce.[2]

Any questions why the Chinese consider Watergate trivial and prefer the bogeyman of the American media much more to their liking than the sainted American?

As Raymond Aron observed Nixon has been blamed for the war in Vietnam that was started by Kennedy. Nixon’s loss to JFK marked the shift in political power from the old line newspaper barons to the newer television moguls, and Nixon became the target of a vicious dishonest press whose influence lasts to this day. Don Hewitt, producer of CBS’s 60 Minutes television program, claimed in the New York Times that his program’s interview of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton in 1992 concerning a romantic liaison with Gennifer Flowers won Clinton the election [3]. On television Mr. Clinton successfully denied any sexual involvement with Miss Flowers. Much later in a court deposition he did admit to having sex with Gennifer. In his younger days Hewitt produced and directed the first television debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. Television coverage of this debate has been credited with winning Kennedy the election because Mr. Nixon had been poorly made up for the camera. Perhaps, John Kennedy had Mr. Hewitt in mind when he talked with Ben-Gurion. With the election of Mr. Clinton the United States at long last had as a leader a worthy offspring of the idiocy of the American popular culture. Those who challenged his right to lead by his lying to evade the draft did not seem to know that most Americans did not think it wrong, but applauded his behavior. Mr. Clinton smugly knew his critics only won him votes.

I lived through that era. I was politically aware at that time. If you look back at that period in history, basically all the political goals of the non-looney Left in America were achieved with Nixon in the White House. Ending the Vietnam War,ending the Draft,recognizing Red China,Nuclear Arms Treaties with the Soviet Union,Civil Rights advances, The creation of the EPA,Roe vs.Wade, the growth of the Welfare State,going off the final link to the Gold Standard,Wage and Price Controls etc. Even the Women’s Equal Rights Amendment came closest to passing during Nixon’s tenure. Nixon turned out to be a very “liberal” President indeed. Yet,he is portrayed by the liberal Press and the liberal Establishment,at that time and even today,as some kind of monster. As a libertarian,I voted for Nixon in 1968 wishing for the best. However,by the early 70′s with the establishment of the Libertarian Party and at the same time becoming disillusioned with the so called “conservative” Republican Party, I voted Libertarian and have so since. The only explanation of hate toward Nixon by the Left seems to me to stem from the Alger Hiss Case and the McCarthy Era. Nixon help lead the charge in exposing Communist infiltration into the American scene. With the Helen Gahegan Douglass campaign and the Alger Hiss Case behind him, the Left called Nixon a “Red Baiter” and worse. I guess they never forgave him for what he did. In the end,Nixon was proven right. Forty or fifty years after his expose,it was found that Hiss and others were definitely Soviet agents. As time passes,even though I disagreed with much of Nixon’s presidency, I really think that historians might be kinder to his legacy. After all,as they say,”time heals all wounds.”

“This is the worst piece of revisionism in this piece. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was in 1971. It knocked down the final barriers to segregation. The South voted Republican because they saw what was happening and wanted to stop it. When they didn’t win, it made them even more Republican. The implication that Nixon was leading desegregation is ridiculous.”

Not leading, but the results speak for themselves. The argument wouldn’t be that Nixon was the most determined desegregator, but that he or his people took the forces in play into account and combined action and inaction to produce a result that satisfied desegregationists without alienating the white South. Think “hidden hand presidency.”

Opening to up to China good for America? As Chou En Lai might put it, “Too early to tell.” It’s not looking very good for the financial well-being of the American worker at this point. But Nixon and Kissinger were playing The Great Game, not acting in the interests of the majority, silent, moral or otherwise.

Let’s see. Started OSHA,the EPA,Wage and Price Controls,had his own national healthcare plan resembling Obamacare. I could go on with how he expanded government,
Illegally invaded Cambodia,expanding the war in Vietnam. Promoted affirmative action. Maybe I am missing the conservatism somewhere?

RE: Ed. “Not leading, but the results speak for themselves. The argument wouldn’t be that Nixon was the most determined desegregator, but that he…” etc.

Yes, the results do speak for themselves — and the key result, openly sought after by Nixon and his team, was the shift of white Southern voters from the Democratic to the Republican party. It was called “the Southern strategy,” and its existence was acknowledged at the time by Nixon’s advisor Kevin Phillips, who said in a 1970 NYT interview: “Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

I guess you could describe those as good intentions, as long as you don’t object to the continued nurturing of white racism (oops, I mean white resentment of “reverse discrimination”) as a political asset to be exploited.

Pete: I’m wondering if that one motive explanation isn’t a little too simplistic to describe how government actually works. But in any case contrast the South today with the South in the 1960s or the US today with the US in the 1960s for your answer.

Race was bound to play a role in politics. How could it not play a role, one way or another? Wallace voters weren’t going to go away, but they could be absorbed into less racially focused parties.

By many measures, we’re a less racially divided, a less racist, and a better country today than we were 40 years ago. I don’t know if Nixon deserves credit for that, but a more aggressive, more antagonistic policy might not have produced better results.

The Trotskyists, white supremacists and Israel Firsters who had conspired to replace LBJ with the trigger-happy race huckster Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic Presidential nominee, then to bring down the President who had suspended of the draft, who had pursued détente with China and with the USSR, and who was edging towards ending the Vietnam War. Nixon had declared that “I am now a Keynesian in economics.” As Milton Friedman bitterly put it, “We are all Keynesians now.” Not for much longer, they weren’t.

Nixon’s was the age of wage and price control, of the Clean Air Act, of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, of the War on Cancer and the War on Drugs, of Title IX that banned sex discrimination in federally funded education, of the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and of the insistence that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents.

Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we should find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it.